Pandemic flu; it has hit before – will it come again?

Recently I spent some time with my 92-year old mother. She had just received her latest issue of AARP The Magazine, which contained a very sobering interview with Dr. Robert G. Webster, one of the world's leading virologist and flu experts.

Dr. Webster correctly pointed out that the 1918 flu pandemic, which sickened and killed millions around the world, was actually a distant cousin to today's bird flu. According to authorities, bird flu may mutate into a major health crisis in just a few short years, or even months, becoming even deadlier than the 1918 variety.

My mother remembers the terrible time in 1918 when the flu hit their family:

"Papa had taken a job in an Atlanta steel mill. He was also a player on the company's baseball team. When the epidemic hit, a kindly black man found Papa unconscious from the effects of the flu, dressed in his baseball uniform, lying beside the path from the baseball field to our house. That Good Samaritan carried Papa to our home where Mama sent for a doctor. Mama and four of us girls also came down with the flu, but Mama somehow cared for us all. We almost died.

"Then my youngest sister, six-month-old Violet, contracted the flu.

"The doctor gave up on saving little Violet, so Mama sent for Grandpa, whose intensive care and home remedies helped. When the doctor returned later, he was amazed to find that Violet had survived."

That experience left a lasting impression on my mother.

How bad was the 1918 flu? Excerpts from Stanford University's website tell in graphic detail: "The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War … at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four years of the Bubonic Plague."

These avian flu strains somehow turn our own immune systems against us. In 1918 the young and healthy sickened and died quickest.

"The death rate for 15 to 34-year-olds of influenza and pneumonia were 20 times higher in 1918 than in previous years … People were struck with illness on the street and died rapid deaths. One anecdote shared of 1918 was of four women playing bridge together late into the night. Overnight, three of the women died from influenza … Others told stories of people on their way to work suddenly developing the flu and dying within hours … One physician writes that patients with seemingly ordinary influenza would rapidly 'develop the most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been seen' and later when cyanosis appeared in the patients, 'it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate' … Another physician recalls that the influenza patients 'died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth' …The physicians of the time were helpless against this powerful agent of influenza" (http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/ ).

What is some of Dr. Webster's advice if today's bird flu mutates into a similar human pathogen?

"You mean if they can't get a vaccine? I'd say: If they have a house in the hills, then go to it – and stay there for three months. And have enough food there already so you can stay as far away from your neighbors as possible … If this killer virus hits, the country's infrastructure will fall apart. The hospitals will be overloaded. Most of us don't realize how interdependent we are for food. In a pandemic, people would get sick, the gasoline supply would stop, food would not be there."

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